As part of Apertura Madrid Gallery Weekend, Alzueta Gallery presents CASA VACÍA, the new solo exhibition by Maru Quiñonero.
The exhibition brings together her most recent paintings, which engage in dialogue with the unpublished poetry collection COMO AGARRAR UN PUÑADO DE ARROZ, released by the artist during the same week. Together, painting and text construct an intimate narrative, where the plastic gesture and the brief written word intertwine to form a body of work that breathes in two languages: that of color and that of writing.
The poetry collection functions as a kind of artist’s diary—a fragmentary record of thoughts, emotions, and observations born in her Chueca studio. In it, Quiñonero gathers notes, verses, and aphorisms that emerge from daily life: the search for inspiration, the contemplation of color, the solitude of studio work. Painting becomes a form of emotional thinking, and writing, a tool for organizing the invisible.
Quiñonero constructs a deeply personal visual narrative through abstraction, where color serves as both an essential language and an emotional vehicle. Her work, defined by bold forms and sensitive geometry, stems from a deliberate pursuit of beauty as both origin and destination, as cause and effect.
In this new series, the artist simplifies her color palette and gives greater depth to the backgrounds, which now take center stage. Black, used prominently, does not obscure but rather lends weight, clarity, and structure to compositions that are simple yet meditated. The combination of pencil and paint on vast color fields creates layers that can be read as emotional strata—traces of a life that is both thought and painted simultaneously.
“There is now something like a need to approach certain forms,” the artist notes. “Forms that evoke and perhaps circle around figuration. A suggested formalism that grounds ideas and materializes them in new shared spaces. Writing—and especially the act of organizing it—has led me to a different cognitive level than the one I usually inhabit when navigating and approaching my abstract painting.
COMO AGARRAR UN PUÑADO DE ARROZ emerges from her routines and the scattered notes she often takes. Most are dedicated to painting, to color, to the search for inspiration—or its absence—and to the countless hours spent in her studio. Some are about her dogs. Some notes, written in verse, take the form of short poems; others, in prose, are simple aphorisms or observations. Together, they form a kind of abstract literature of her days.”
CASA VACÍA is presented as an expanded work born from the intimacy of the studio, where every stroke and every word are part of the same gesture: to observe, to record, and to transform the everyday. As Agnes Martin once wrote, “Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” In this exhibition, that subtlety is expressed in the coexistence of the visual and the written—in the search for a form that is not only seen, but also read and remembered.
© Text and Photo Courtesy of Azueta Gallery Madrid
